


Nevermore

by dismalzelenka



Category: Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: Character Death, F/M, Grief, Horror, Introspection, Psychological Horror, Sadness, Scout Harding's walnut bread, Self Loathing, Spooky
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-31
Updated: 2019-10-31
Packaged: 2021-01-15 08:33:40
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,419
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21250472
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dismalzelenka/pseuds/dismalzelenka
Summary: Once upon a midnight dreary, Cullen Rutherford comes face to face with a ghost from his past.





	Nevermore

**Author's Note:**

  * For [masulevin](https://archiveofourown.org/users/masulevin/gifts).

> This is my entry for fic-or-treat 2019, gifted to the lovely and talented [masulevin](https://archiveofourown.org/users/masulevin/pseuds/masulevin)! Happy Spooktober!!

It was a particularly dreary night. These days, most of them were, as Harvestmere wrapped up and perpetually grey skies heralded the onslaught of snow that generally marked the arrival of Firstfall. 

It wasn't that Skyhold didn't receive its fair share of snow year-round. Aside from two or three weeks in mid-Justinian where the ice began to melt ever so slightly and drench the surrounding valleys with summer flooding, snow seemed to be an ever present constant here. Firstfall, though—Firstfall brought with it the kind of snow that blanketed the earth with wet, waist deep muffled silence that would send all of Skyhold grinding to a quiet, frozen halt. 

Not that any of it mattered to Cullen. The sun would set outside, as it always did—bathing his office in vivid oranges, reds, and purples through the narrow windows and the gaping hole in his roof for one fleeting hour—and then he would spend the bulk of the night at his desk, as  _ he  _ always did, candles burning low into the early hours of the morning. 

Anything, really, to stave off the nightmares. 

Three knocks sounded in succession on his door, and then it opened before he could say anything. 

“Hey, Cullen.” Trevelyan poked her head in and offered a grin. “A bunch of us are going to get good and drunk on pumpkin wine for Hallow’s Eve. You should join us. I have it on good authority there will be a rousing game of strip diamondback. Bull’s even bringing a shirt for the occasion.” 

He chuckled and shook his head. “As exciting as that sounds, I have to finish looking over these reports before tomorrow, or Leliana will have my head.” 

“Cullen!” she whined. “Hallow’s Eve only happens once a year! Come down from your tower for once and celebrate, for once, unwind a little.”

“So does Satinalia,” he pointed out. “And Summerday and First Day and All Soul’s and Kissing Day and that blasted Orlesian affair with all the masks—”

“Carnival,” she provided helpfully. 

Cullen pinched the bridge of his nose and closed his eyes. “Yes, clearly, you are all entirely lacking in occasions for celebration,” he ground out through gritted teeth. 

When he opened his eyes, the cheery smile was gone from Trevelyan's face. She breathed a heavy sigh and shook her head. “Suit yourself, I suppose,” she said finally. “We’ll be in the Great Hall if you change your mind.” 

He was sure she didn’t mean to slam the door, but the resounding thud of heavy oak on the door frame echoed through the office anyway and left an awkward, ringing silence in its wake. 

Despite Trevelyan’s thoughts, it wasn’t that he was particularly averse to celebrating. Trevelyan’s boundless enthusiasm for Hallow’s Eve just reminded him too much of someone else he once knew. Someone he didn't want to think about, who somehow crept into his thoughts anyway when he least expected it. 

It always unnerved him just how much Trevelyan resembled Amell. Same height and build—tall and willowy—with the same coppery auburn hair she also wore in a single braid down her back. The same olive complexion, right down to the loose smattering of freckles across the bridge of her slightly crooked nose. 

He recalled with fondness Amell telling him a story of how she’d broken her nose as a child, and how she’d stubbornly refused to tell anyone about it until it had set wrong and it was too late for the healers to fix it. She’d worn it proudly ever since, loud, brash, rowdy Amell, all gangly limbs and crooked teeth and full of far too much life to be facing a lifetime cloistered away from the rest of the world. When a light like hers was snuffed out, it was a wonder the sun itself didn’t bury itself away from grief. 

Grief, which even now, ten years later, held his chest in a vice grip until the air in his lungs fought to make its presence known. 

Something squawked and flapped outside of his window and made him jump in his seat. He looked up to one of Leliana’s ravens perched at the edge of his desk, a great black feathery thing with ugly, beady eyes that eyed him with suspicion even as it unceremoniously dropped a scroll on his desk and flapped away with a loud screech and a hailstorm of black feathers. He grimaced and swept them to the floor, picking through the mess for the scroll it left behind. 

Much to his chagrin, the scroll was nowhere to be found. He groaned and sighed in annoyance and turned back to the stack of papers still present in front of him. Field reports. Right. 

The first one he picked up was three pages of unreadable scrawling bound together in the corner with what looked suspiciously like a dented armor rivet. It also appeared to have been rained on or dropped in water at some point. He squinted at the first line, which thankfully seemed to be the least illegible. 

_ Warden Activity Crestwood G. Blackwall _

Well. That explained the rivet, he supposed. And the water stains. He set the report aside for when he’d had a bit more sleep and reached for the next one. 

_ armory out of good arrows heres a list -s _

What followed was a meticulously detailed list of different types of arrows, quantities, costs, and suppliers, which was an oddly jarring and surprising contrast to the colorful collection of crude drawings doodled in the margins. He signed the bottom and set it aside in a different pile. 

_ Venatori Activity In Western Approach Permission To Engage Requested _ read the next one, followed by a name he didn’t recognize. He puzzled over it for a few moments before making a note to ask about it later and setting it on top of Blackwall’s report. 

He wasn’t sure when he fell asleep, only that it was an urgent pounding at his door that roused him with a start. He groaned, peeled a loose piece of parchment from his face, and squinted. The single candle left alight on his desk had burned down to a sad stub that sent eerie shadows flitting across the room any time the wind blew through the window. “Come in,” he called, voice cracking slightly with sleep.

No one answered. The silence left his ears ringing, an eerie prickle crawling up his spine. He sighed and rummaged around in his desk for a fresh candle—ah, was  _ that _ where the scroll had fallen earlier?—when the pounding began again.

“Come in!” he growled. The door across from his desk was the one with the broken lock, anyway, his patience was wearing thin, and Maker’s breath, it wasn’t like anyone else bothered waiting for him to open the blasted thing. 

The third set of heavy knocks drew him from his chair. “I said let yourself through the bloody door!” he roared as he flung it open.

The only thing that met him was the wind, icy and needling and sending the late autumn chill drafting through his office. The candle flickered wildly on his desk and sputtered out. He peered out, glancing left and right for any telltale sign someone had absconded over the side of the breezeway. 

A prank from Sera, perhaps? He frowned. As many times as he’d fallen into her frankly quite juvenile traps, this sort of thing wasn’t exactly her style. Cole? No, he mused. Cole never bothered with doors anyway. It was far more likely of the boy to just …  _ appear _ in the middle of his desk at the most inopportune time possible. 

The door to the Great Hall was ajar somewhere down below, and a sudden peal of raucous laughter echoed across the courtyard and sent a fresh pang of emotion through his chest. It struck him in that moment how utterly alone he was, how alone he’d  _ been _ , how the Circle he'd sworn his life to robbed him of his closest friend and he'd spent the rest of his miserable existence pushing everyone else away ever since. 

He shook his head and turned back to his desk, thankful he’d at least pulled out a fresh candle to light before his last one burned out. He bent over the dying embers in his fireplace and watched, mesmerized, as the wick sparked to life. Part of his mind, the sleep-addled bit prone to poetic musings he’d likely never admit aloud, wondered if there was a metaphor in there somewhere. 

Maker, he needed to sleep more.

He’d likely never admit that aloud to anyone either. 

Trevelyan knew about the nightmares. She even knew the lack of lyrium lent them a particularly vivid quality that made every horror his mind visited upon him in his sleep that much harder to shake off in his waking life. 

Speaking of which...he frowned and made his way back to his desk. It occurred to him just then that his brief involuntary nap had been the first dream-free stretch of sleep he’d had in months. It left him feeling rather frustrated, as though his one chance at uninterrupted sleep had been spent and ruined by whatever stranger felt the need to beat on his door at this ungodly hour of the morning. 

Another gust of wind, a particularly strong one, blew in through the windows and rattled the papers on his desk. He affixed the candle into its stand and sank back into his chair with a heavy sigh. A familiar pounding had started back up behind his left eye. 

A strange tapping sound echoed from the corner of the room. He frowned and turned to investigate. 

“Maker preserve me,” he muttered at the sight. He knew then he absolutely must be going mad, because there in the corner was Amell,  _ his  _ Amell, dead-for-ten-years Amell, perched on the back of the armchair Josephine had insisted on placing there months ago. She eyed him passively, legs crossed casually at the ankle and propped up on the arm of the chair, with the same vividly piercing blue eyes that haunted his dreams. 

“Am I dreaming, then?” he asked aloud. Her silent gaze made him shiver, gooseflesh prickling down his arms beneath his sleeves. 

The only sound that followed his query was the wind outside, whistling quietly as it picked up speed. 

He rubbed his eyes and looked away. Surely, he was going mad.  _ Surely _ he imagined her, surely he—

She was still there when he looked up, watching silently, unblinking. 

“Are you real?” he said finally. The words felt ridiculous even as he said them. 

She opened her mouth and formed some response, but no sound escaped her lips. He stared at her for a few moments longer, then forced himself to sit. He picked up another page, tried to focus on resuming his work, but the words swam on the paper. The wind blew another gust through the window and scattered the loose pages to the floor before he had a chance to anchor them. 

He flapped a hand at the apparition in annoyance and bit back the unease pooling in his stomach. He’d simply been awake far too long, and dwelling on the wrong things for even longer, and as soon as he went back to his work and willed the vision away, he would be left alone. He picked up a quill and began jotting out a missive to Griffon Wing Keep regarding an earlier report. To work, always to work, to drown out the static in his mind and the steady, persistent nagging that something wasn’t quite right. 

When he looked up, he almost knocked over the inkwell. Amell stood directly in front of his desk, and if she had been staring at him earlier, now she was practically looking  _ through _ him, as though he were the specter and she had been the one living and breathing all along. 

“Why are you here?” he breathed. He wanted to look away. He wanted so badly to close his eyes and escape the onslaught of questions he wanted to simultaneously ask and bury. He stared back instead, transfixed, by the way her spectral form seemed to flicker into corporeality for a moment or two at a time, as though if the candlelight hit her at just the right angle it would light her back into existence before his very eyes. 

“—ore,” she whispered. Whatever she said was drowned out by another gust of wind outside whistling eerily into the rafters. 

He wanted to look away. 

He couldn’t. 

She’d been his only real friend during his brief tenure at Kinloch. At the time, he's thought much the same about himself for her; it wasn't until after her death that he'd realized just how many people genuinely mourned her passing. 

If he looked too closely at the figure standing before him, he could almost see the sword buried through her chest, could almost smell the coppery tang of blood that assaulted his senses anytime he recalled the scene. 

And recall it he did, with agonizing frequency, even now. 

He could have prevented everything, if only he’d been paying attention. If he’d listened to her pleas for aid as the Circle’s politics slowly unraveled from the inside, heeded her petitions for intervention on her colleagues’ behalf. If only he’d gotten to his post on time that day, if he’d been present when the tensions finally snapped. 

As it happened, he’d walked into the library to magic crackling in the air, drawn swords, and the body of a dead apprentice on the floor, small and vacant-eyed and entirely too young for such a grisly fate. It never occurred to him until years later that, in the days that followed, he’d never even learned the boy’s name. There were too many fires burning, too much unrest to quell for the dust to ever have settled.

But Amell, Maker preserve them all, Amell had burned the brightest that day, hair blown wildly about her face, voice tinged with steel and calling for justice, lightning crackling at her fingers like the flaming sword of Andraste herself.

And he’d watched them cut her down all the same. He'd watched her die, and he'd done nothing at all to stop it.

The figure before him flickered again as the memory crossed his mind. He rubbed his eyes and studied her form, even as the familiar ache of long-festering guilt gnawed away at his insides once more. 

“I would do things differently now, you know,” he whispered. “I should have listened to you. Would that I could now, I—”

Her voice, when she finally spoke, was faint, echoed slightly, and entirely too quiet to understand. “Nev—” she said, her form flickering out of existence just long enough to cut her words off before they even began. 

“What is it?” he demanded, desperation clawing its way up his gullet. “Why are you here? What would you have from me?” He stood up abruptly enough to send his chair clattering backwards onto the stone floor, pounded his fist on the desk, tears welling up at his eyes as the ever present ache that had been steadily building since her appearance in his office reached a breaking point. 

She was a demon, he realized suddenly, when she simply stared at him, unreacting, still unblinking. She had to be, this ethereal ghost with the piercing eyes, some demon of agony sent to torment him, to reopen old wounds and feast on the anguish brought on by a past that would never, ever die. 

She was a demon come to wring her pound of flesh from his decade of scathing self hatred, and he would deserve every ounce of torment it brought. 

She moved then, held out a hand and beckoned him to the door leading to the battlements, and Maker preserve his every move,  _ he followed her _ . Whatever his punishment, whatever her retribution, it would certainly be just. Especially after Kirkwall, where inaction only begot more inaction and he’d watched history repeat itself over and over again. He followed Amell through the door. Some part of him was dimly aware that his thoughts were becoming jumbled, incoherent, but then again, when was the last time anything truly made sense? 

The wind whipped about his face. Sleet had begun to fall. The courtyard was dark, the moon hidden behind a curtain of cloud that draped an ominous blanket of shadow across his vision. One step, then two, then three; she led him across the slippery, ice-slick stone to some destination unknown, and he carefully picked his way after her as the wind threatened to knock him clear off his feet. 

In the inky blackness of night, she almost seemed to glow, a faint beacon just barely illuminating the path before him. He could just make out the outline of the entrance to the next tower. Amell extended a hand, slender and spectral, and he found himself overcome with a need to grasp it. To close his fingers around hers, fall to his knees and beg for forgiveness and hope beyond all hope for the peace only absolution could provide. 

If only he’d listened back then. If only he'd listened. If only he’d—

His next step, his foot met empty space. Amell floated nearby and watched him fall, hand still outstretched, a faint smile playing at the corners of her lips. Was this it, then? Was this her retribution? Was it always meant to play out this way? 

He barely felt it when he landed. The pain came slowly, only rolling over him in waves when he realized he couldn't move, or even breathe; then he was gasping for air, pawing at the massive splinter of half-rotted wood lodged firmly through his chest. Amell stood just out of reach, her translucent form fully corporeal now, her gaze ever unblinking as he coughed and spat a mouthful of blood. 

“Never again,” she whispered, trademark crooked smile spreading across a face that suddenly contained far too many teeth. “ _ Nevermore _ .” 

Cullen jolted awake to pounding on his office door. He looked frantically around his office, at the papers that  _ should  _ have been wind-scattered all over his floor, instead stacked neatly before him under a paperweight, the corners rustling from the breeze blowing in through the open window. The candle on his desk, not burnt to a stub but still burning strong; the fire still crackling in the fireplace, only barely begun to die down. “Come in,” he tried to say, but the only sound that escaped his mouth was a hoarse croak. 

Not that it mattered. Trevelyan, who never did hold much regard for closed doors, eased her way inside, back bracing the door, a steaming tray of soup and tea balanced in her arms. “Maker, Cullen, you look  _ awful _ .” She set the tray down on the corner of his desk and stared at him disapprovingly, arms crossed over her chest. “I brought you some stew, since you insisted on working through the night again, but I really must insist you stand up this instant and take a break. As your Inquisitor, I am ordering you to take the rest of the night off, and that is absolutely final.” 

He briefly wondered how many times she’d rehearsed this speech on the way up here. He rose unsteadily to his feet, bracing himself against his desk as he swayed. He brushed his fingers against the spot in his chest where his wound would have been, half expecting his hand to come away covered in blood and feeling rather silly when it didn’t. Trevelyan raised an eyebrow at him. “I can’t tell if you’re about to follow me downstairs or kick me out,” she said, flashing him a crooked grin that looked so much like Amell he felt an involuntary shudder ripple down his spine. 

“That’s—” He cleared his throat and forced a pleasant expression to his face. “That won’t be necessary, Inquisitor. I believe there was mention of pumpkin wine?” 

Trevelyan bounced excitedly on her heels at his answer. “Yes! And spiced cider, and Scout Harding made the most amazing walnut bread—” 

Cullen followed her downstairs in silence while she chattered excitedly about the holidays and stared distantly at the welcoming light of the Great Hall doors. He briefly turned his gaze back to his tower, and for a moment he was certain he could still see  _ her:  _ unblinking eyes and razor smile, motionless and waiting, still standing by his chamber door. 


End file.
